Lit Hub Daily: December 12, 2025
THE BEST OF THE LITERARY INTERNET
TODAY: In 2016, Shirley Hazzard dies.
- “I do have faith in the creative imagination, overall, from the cave paintings to rap, as well as its role in mathematics and science, and including, too, the religious and moral imagination.” Peter Mishler interviews Maurice Riordan. | Lit Hub In Conversation
- Samuel Miller McDonald considers Black liberation, the abolition of slavery, and the myth of progress. | Lit Hub History
- Haruka Iwasaki recommends holiday romance novels by Hannah Grace, Lana Ferguson, Lucy Score and more! | Lit Hub Reading Lists
- “I suspect the surprise would be how little I’m glued to my chair.” Shelby Van Pelt, Tracy K. Smith, and more writers share the most surprising parts of their creative routines. | Lit Hub Craft
- How Sam Shepard became New York’s star counterculture playwright: “You’re seeing this apparition taking place. I don’t mean to sound hocus pocus about it, but there’s something taking place, and you’re true to that.” | Lit Hub Biography
- “Donatien, a gesture at five-thirty in the morning in late-summer Paris, asks me with which animal I most identify…” Read from Fátima Vélez’s debut novel, Galapagos. | Lit Hub Fiction
- Madeleine Wickham, the author of the Shopaholic novels who wrote under the pseudonym Sophie Kinsella, has died at 55. | The New York Times
- Horst Bredekamp explores the artistic lineage that informed Frank Gehry’s sketches. | The MIT Press Reader
- “Every time I have to write about Rome for some publication abroad, I feel like I’m either selling out parts of the city or snitching on friends to foreign secret services.” Francesco Pacifico on the scourge of American tourists. | The Dial
- Larissa Diakiw on what humans can learn about ourselves from bats. | Hazlitt
- How famed paranormal radio host Art Bell laid the groundwork for podcasters. | The Point
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Featured image: Christopher Peterson, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons
